According to Sorrel et al. (2012), "the macrotidal Seine Estuary and Mont-Saint-Michel Bay are two coastal sedimentary systems both located along the southern coast of the English Channel in northwestern France," an area that they say is "well suited to investigate long-term storminess variability because it is exposed to the rapidly changing North Atlantic climate system, which has a substantial influence on the Northern Hemisphere in general."

In light of the great significance of the facts described above, Sorrel et al. go on to present "a reappraisal of high-energy estuarine and coastal sedimentary records from the southern coast of the English Channel," and in doing so, they report finding "evidence for five distinct periods during the Holocene when storminess was enhanced during the past 6,500 years."

Specifically, the six scientists say they found that "high storm activity occurred periodically with a frequency of about 1,500 years, closely related to cold and windy periods diagnosed earlier (Bond et al., 2001; Wanner et al., 2008; Wanner et al., 2011)." And they go on to show that "millennial-scale storm extremes in northern Europe are phase-locked with the period of internal ocean variability in the North Atlantic of about 1,500 years (Debret et al., 2009)," with the last extreme stormy period "coinciding with the early to mid-Little Ice Age," while "in contrast, the warm Medieval Climate Optimum was characterized by low storm activity (Sorrel et al., 2009; Sabatier et al., 2012)."

Sorrel et al. conclude that "in light of concerns about the impact of anthropogenic greenhouse gases on extreme storm events in the coming years/decades, our results indicate that modern coupled ocean-atmosphere dynamics at North Atlantic mid-latitudes should tend towards the low phase of the 1,500-year internal oceanic cycle, in contrast to Little Ice Age climate conditions [italics added]," which state of affairs suggests that warming should lead to relatively less storminess, or just the opposite of what the world's climate alarmists would have everyone believe.